Christ the Event: Ever Ancient, Ever New

Photo by Ardi Evans on Unsplash

O Beauty, ever ancient and ever new!

Happy New Year, everyone!

This new year, I am reminded of this quote in Augustine’s Confessions. The thing is that I am thinking about this quote with a twist, because in the wake of the long silence that was 2020, I found myself asking the question: is this year really going to be a new one, or will the patterns of the old one show themselves again, even as I try to wish that they do not?

These thoughts have become more present in my mind given that we have just gotten out of Christmastide. Just a short while ago, we remembered that God did not merely reside up in the heavens, but took on flesh and dwelt among us, so that we can behold this beauty of the Lord as a visceral reality (Jn 1:14).

However, the time has come to pass and we are now to move onto the humdrum of everyday life. As I go back to my routine, I get the sense that the time of beholding this beauty has similarly come to pass. What is more, as my routine really starts to sink in, I get the sense that the time of beholding any newness has also come to pass, and that what remains is the never-ending drone of of soul-sucking repetition.

“Happy New Year indeed”, I say unto myself.

It was then that a homily I heard in advent came to mind, where the homilist spoke of Paul adopting a posture of living in a perpetual advent, that is an eternal state of expecting this coming of Christ into our midst. For Paul, not a moment went by, or a move made, when he did not expect the presence of Christ.

This reminder dovetailed with a point made in Julian Carron’s The Radiance in Your Eyes. In it, Carron spoke not only of Christ as a presence but as an “event that bursts into my life” (64).

What accounts for the difference between a presence and an event? A presence can be momentary and leave the surrounds untouched. The moment such a presence is removed, what remains before us is the glare of the status quo.

An event, by contrast, is a presence with a difference. It is a presence that breaks into, interrupts and transforms the material structure of space and time. Not only that, an event is not simply a moment that comes and goes. Like the dude in The Big Lebowski, the event abides. The event that transforms everything also bakes itself into the DNA of every thing and every moment, such that the transformation it brings about is perpetual. Having been broken into by the event, no moment and no thing in our history remains the same.

Carron goes on to say that Christ, as a Christian event takes “the form of an encounter, a human encounter in day-to-day reality” (68). Yet with every encounter with this event, each moment is given “a new horizon” (Carron quotes Benedict XVI here), wherein our engagements become restructured, become fundamentally transformed, by the multiplication of possibilities that reside in the Word of God. To borrow from marxist terminology, the presence of an event coincides with a pure and perpetual beginning.

In the event of Christ, things - even crushingly familiar things - do not have the same determinism as they had before, and we do not need to resign ourselves to expecting to be boxed in yet again by what came before. The ever ancient patterns that we have become painfully used to can, in the event, unlock other potentialities when seen through the eyes of Christ.

The risk we face is that unlocking such unfamiliar new potentialities can be uncomfortable, even traumatising, as the old wineskin of patterns, behaviours and ways of thinking that once helped us make sense of things get superceded by new and unfamiliar alternatives. The key to acclimatising oneself to these new circumstances, Carron suggests, is an ongoing proximity and familiarity to the event that brought these new circumstances about. To abide in this new earth means to constantly abide in Christ (Jn 15:4).

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